Category: South Asia

If You Have Neither on Your Side, Pound the Table

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With prospects for both a minimum wage hike and Neera Tanden’s becoming head of the Office and Management and Budget (OMB) dimming, the Biden administration has decided to ignore the minimum wage and go all in on the (rather unqualified and genuinely horrible person) Neera Tanden and ignore the plight of roughly 48 million people working for less than the proposed $15 per hour.

In their desperation, an old lawyer’s adage applies, “If you have the facts on your side, pound the facts. If you have the law on your side, pound the law. If you have neither on your side, pound the table.“

In this case, pounding the table means, ignoring the reasons for the opposition, as venal and corrupt as they and playing the “Race Card,” which in this case means getting Americans of South Asian extraction riled up about this simply because Tanden is of South Asian extraction:

President Joe Biden’s aides are urging Asian American groups to mount a last-minute campaign to try to rescue his budget chief nominee, Neera Tanden, as her prospects for Senate confirmation dwindle.

Those groups are calling and sending letters to Senate offices and advocating for Tanden on social media to try to combat what they are calling “structural racism” and “institutional racism.”

Their efforts have been actively encouraged by the White House and presidential transition staff, which remains in place to help with Senate confirmations, along with the Democratic National Committee, according to two people familiar with the conversations.

The opposition to her comes from two real, though stupid and corrupt, sources, Republican butt-hurt over her mean Tweets (as if there is any other kind of Tweet), and Joe Manchin’s decades long project to use his power as an elected official to benefit his daughter. (Manchin is lying about his being disturbed by the Tweets)

This is not an issue of Race.  If it were, Deb Haaland would have never gotten the nod, as indigenous Americans have always been further down in the racial hierarchy than pretty much everyone but Blacks and Hispanics.

Invoking racism is stupid and counter productive because it will not work and because it “wears out the batteries” on the tactic.

Keep your powder dry, because Tanden is all wet.

And yet I find just the opposite to be true. The replacement is even more extreme

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What a surprise.  The US policy of assassination makes extremest groups more extreme and more dangerous:


The elimination of Taliban leader Mansour will only increase the danger to Afghan civilians, a US terrorism analyst, whose research focuses on the impact of targeted killings, predicts.

Dr Max Abrahms, from Northeastern University in Boston, said the US Government does not look carefully enough at the strategic implications of its strikes on extremist leaders.

He said he had done a number of studies on leadership decapitation of a militant group and he had not found a statistically significant reduction in the amount of violence perpetrated by the group after a leader was removed.

“In fact these decapitation strikes can actually be counter-productive, because one of the assumptions of the targeted killing campaigns is that the replacement of the leader that you killed will be more moderate,” Dr Abrahms said.

“And yet I find just the opposite to be true. The replacement is even more extreme.

“So for that reason, in the immediate aftermath of a successful targeted killing, like over this weekend, the group’s violence tends to become even more extreme, in the sense that it’s even more likely to attack civilian targets.”

………

“What I’ve seen is that the younger people to emerge in the Taliban are actually even crazier, if you will, than the old guard.”

And then Abrams says that, “He did not think the US Government very carefully studied the strategic implications of taking out Mansour.”

Gee, you think?

The problem here is that there are way too many people out there who think that our “Freedumb Bomz” will make the world a better place because they are our weapons.

Like the bite of a dog into a stone, it is a stupidity.

H/t Empty Wheel.

Oceania Had Always Been at War with Eastasia

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I don’t know about you, but this sure sounds like boots on the ground:

  • More special forces to Iraq.
  • Troops on the ground in Yemen.
  • The US is running an airfield in Syria:
    The U.S. military has all-but confirmed it’s in control of an airstrip in northern Syria. For months, reports in Arabic have described the base near Rmaylan, Syria, with Americans helping expand the runway as low-flying, unmarked helicopters make daily trips to and from Turkey.

    On May 6, U.S. Army Col. Steve Warren, a spokesman for Operation Inherent Resolve, didn’t exactly deny the existence of the airstrip when asked about it. “The soon to be 300 American forces working in Syria need to be resupplied,” Warren wrote. “Aerial resupply only makes good sense.”

Obama ran as a peace candidate.

Hillary Clinton, the next likely president, is about as bellicose as Dick Cheney.

Our policy of military interventions, and followup interventions to fix our first interventions has made us less safe, killed thousands of our soldiers, and around ¼ million civilians.

We have destabilized these societies, and strengthened terrorist organizations and made us far less safe, but our solution is more war.

This is insane.

India Can Go Cheney Itself

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India is taking the US to the WTO over the increase in fees for H1B visas:

India has complained to the World Trade Organisation (WTO) about the United States’ decision to increase visa application fees.

The USA last year doubled the fee required to apply for an H1-B visa, a class of temporary visa for skilled workers. Fees rose to US4,000 per application.

Indian technology companies have complained long and loud about the cost of H1-B visas, arguing that they need to bring workers from India to the USA to grow their businesses. US businesses retort that Indian companies could hire locals with comparable skills, but prefer to import people who they pay lower wages.

………

India’s now formally complained to the WTO, which sets the clock ticking on a 60-day mediation process. If nothing can be resolved, the WTO can rule on the dispute.

If I had my druthers, I’d shut the whole program down.

It’s rife with abuse, and depresses wages in technical fields in the United States.

Funniest Lad Mad Cover in Pakistan of the Day

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Pakistani actress Veena Malik just appeared nude on the cover of FHM India sporting ink on her left arm saying “ISI”.

This is a reference to the Pakistani intelligence service which has been accused of supporting terrorists in South Asia, and they are not amused:

In this month’s issue of FHM India, an international men’s magazine, Pakistani actress Veena Malik made worldwide headlines with a risqué nude photo shoot. While much of the attention has been on what Malik wasn’t wearing, one of the most powerful elements of her photo shoot was what she was sporting: a big, bold tattoo on her left arm, stating very simply, “ISI,” for Pakistani’s secretive Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate.

The cover headline: “Pakistani W.M.D. Veena Malik Shows You How to Throw a Grenade!”

Indeed, the cover has been explosive; PakAlertPress.com, for instance splashed a headline on its blog: “India and Pakistan Are Going Nuclear Over Provocative Political Tattoo.” And the photo has elicited a furious reaction in Pakistan’s media and in its living rooms.

In one fell swoop, the enormous tattoo on a bare woman’s body managed to demystify, emasculate and parody the ISI — something most people have been afraid to do in public since the inception of the agency a year after the birth of the nation in 1947. Founded with a mission of coordinating intelligence in the country after Pakistan’s loss to India in the 1947 war in Kashmir, the agency has become a feared, though privately mocked, enterprise, its hands allegedly in every back-room Pakistani deal; rigging elections, training militants for battle in India and Afghanistan, and monitoring its own citizens. The tattoo’s location on Malik’s body takes on special meaning in light of retired Adm. Mike Mullen’s statement in September that the militant Haqqani Network, considered by most Western analysts and experts to be based in the tribal areas of Pakistan, is a “veritable arm” of the ISI.

………

Kabeer Sharma, editor of FHM India, says the ISI tattoo was meant to be a sardonic reflection of India’s own conspiracy theories about the intelligence agency. “In India, you say, ‘The milk has gone bad. The ISI did it,’ They blame all of their problems on ISI,” says Sharma.

Sharma, the son of an Indian satirist and New Delhi bookstore owner, says that a dilemma on the subcontinent is that folks don’t laugh enough over the absurdities of politics. “The problem,” he says, “is that we all blame our problems on this imaginary force. Who is this ISI?” Meanwhile, on the Pakistan side, everything is blamed on RAW. “We collectively have no sense of humor. We have no sense of irony,” he says.

………

But this isn’t just a conspiracy hatched in India (though the magazine was produced there), feeding the siege mentality behind so much of the rhetoric in Pakistan. In a country where the “ghairat brigade,” or honor squad, of talking heads takes regularly to the airwaves to defend Pakistan’s honor against enemies — perceived and imagined — the photo shoot was a victory for a new movement that is emerging in Pakistan: the beghairat brigade, or the squad “without honor,” or more aptly the “shameless brigade.”

To many, the beghairat brigade offers a counter to the conspiracy theories that so permeate debates in Pakistan. Josh White, a scholar on Pakistan at the U.S. Institute of Peace, says, “I think the significance of the small but interesting beghairat movement is that it is trying to forge a way of being genuinely nationalistic without accepting the narrative that all of Pakistan’s problems are the result of someone else’s meddling.”

I am sure that there are some deeper sociological points here, but this tempest in a teapot also amusing as hell.

The Latest in Patent Abuse

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Colgate just filed a patent on Indian herbal recipes that have existed for thousands of years:

India has successfully blocked two patent claims of US consumer goods major Colgate-Palmolive, which wanted intellectual property right (IPR) cover on two oral compositions made from Indian spices and other herbs.

One patent battle took almost seven years, after the New York-based company filed a claim at the European Patent Register on September 29, 2008, for a composition containing botanical extracts from three herbs, including cinnamon, a common kitchen spice across India, known here as “dalchini”.

India opposed the claim using the traditional knowledge digital library (TKDL) database, created in the last decade to fight biopiracy.

The database, maintained by the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), submitted its plea in May 2011, and the European patent office ruled in India’s favour last month.

Two years after filing the first patent claim, Colgate-Palmolive moved another application in 2010 before the European patent office, seeking protection for another oral composition containing nutmeg, ginger, “Bakul” tree, camphor, cinnamon, turmeric, Indian banyan, black pepper, long pepper, Neem and clove. The solution is for treating oral cavity diseases.

………

The digital database, containing Ayurveda, Unani and Siddha formulations, and known medicinal properties of Indian herbs, was created following India’s successful IPR battles on haldi (turmeric), neem and Basmati rice.

The Union Commerce Ministry spent Rs 7.61 crore in 2000 as legal fee to reverse a patent examiner’s decision on basmati rice. “Going by that standard, the TKDL has saved upwards of Rs 500 crore so far, and more to come. In the next step, the government should not only add many more ancient books to the TKDL database but also incorporate knowledge from manuscripts,” said Gupta, who retired in 2013.

There needs to be some sort penalty when firms file fraudulent, because this sort of crap is endemic.

And from the Only Country with a More Dysfunctional Weapons Development Program than Ours………

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It appears that India’s Tejas light fighter ,already more than 30 years in development, will face further delays:

Delayed by more than 15 years, India’s homegrown Light Combat Aircraft (LCA) Mark-1 is ready for critical test flights necessary for its final operational clearance (FOC) at the end of the year, but analysts and Indian Air Force (IAF) officials say that clearance will slip again, to next year.

Though he did not provide a date for the test flights, a Defence Ministry official said they will include firings of a variety of weapons, including air-to-air missiles and Israeli-made Derby beyond-visual-range missiles. The Russian-made close-combat missile R-73 has already been integrated on the aircraft.

………

“FOC would most probably slip to sometime in 2016,” Kak said. “But given the track record, these kind of slippages have over the years been accepted as par for the course.”

The Air Force ordered 20 of the Mark-1s after the aircraft’s initial operational clearance in December 2013, and is set to order an additional 20 following FOC. State-owned Hindustan Aeronautics Ltd. (HAL) will produce all 40 aircraft under limited series production and says it has the capacity to produce eight LCA Mark-1s a year once the full order is placed.

But so far the Air Force has received only one aircraft to use for weapon integration and testing, not the four it wanted to have at this stage.

“Weapons integration has been on for quite some time and the LCA has fired the R73 missile and laser-guided bombs during [the Air Force’s] firepower demonstration in February 2014,” said Daljit Singh, retired Air Force air marshal. “However, more weapons are required to be integrated. In addition to weapons integration, test flights are also required to integrate and test other avionics and systems.

This program has been in development for 32 years, and they still cannot deliver the number of aircraft needed for qualification trials, and those that they do develop will have a lower performance engine than the original domestic powerplant.

This is a complete cluster f%$#.

I Really Don’t Know What to Make of This

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But if Sy Hersh’s account of the killing of Osama bin Laden is even ¼ true, this is the biggest story that he’s ever broken:*

It’s been four years since a group of US Navy Seals assassinated Osama bin Laden in a night raid on a high-walled compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. The killing was the high point of Obama’s first term, and a major factor in his re-election. The White House still maintains that the mission was an all-American affair, and that the senior generals of Pakistan’s army and Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI) were not told of the raid in advance. This is false, as are many other elements of the Obama administration’s account. The White House’s story might have been written by Lewis Carroll: would bin Laden, target of a massive international manhunt, really decide that a resort town forty miles from Islamabad would be the safest place to live and command al-Qaida’s operations? He was hiding in the open. So America said.

 The most blatant lie was that Pakistan’s two most senior military leaders – General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, chief of the army staff, and General Ahmed Shuja Pasha, director general of the ISI – were never informed of the US mission. This remains the White House position despite an array of reports that have raised questions, including one by Carlotta Gall in the New York Times Magazine of 19 March 2014. Gall, who spent 12 years as the Times correspondent in Afghanistan, wrote that she’d been told by a ‘Pakistani official’ that Pasha had known before the raid that bin Laden was in Abbottabad. The story was denied by US and Pakistani officials, and went no further. In his book Pakistan: Before and after Osama (2012), Imtiaz Gul, executive director of the Centre for Research and Security Studies, a think tank in Islamabad, wrote that he’d spoken to four undercover intelligence officers who – reflecting a widely held local view – asserted that the Pakistani military must have had knowledge of the operation. The issue was raised again in February, when a retired general, Asad Durrani, who was head of the ISI in the early 1990s, told an al-Jazeera interviewer that it was ‘quite possible’ that the senior officers of the ISI did not know where bin Laden had been hiding, ‘but it was more probable that they did [know]. And the idea was that, at the right time, his location would be revealed. And the right time would have been when you can get the necessary quid pro quo – if you have someone like Osama bin Laden, you are not going to simply hand him over to the United States.’

 This spring I contacted Durrani and told him in detail what I had learned about the bin Laden assault from American sources: that bin Laden had been a prisoner of the ISI at the Abbottabad compound since 2006; that Kayani and Pasha knew of the raid in advance and had made sure that the two helicopters delivering the Seals to Abbottabad could cross Pakistani airspace without triggering any alarms; that the CIA did not learn of bin Laden’s whereabouts by tracking his couriers, as the White House has claimed since May 2011, but from a former senior Pakistani intelligence officer who betrayed the secret in return for much of the $25 million reward offered by the US, and that, while Obama did order the raid and the Seal team did carry it out, many other aspects of the administration’s account were false.

The cliff notes version of this, courtesy of The Stranger, is:

  • Pakistani officials knew about the raid and even helped the US pull it off.
  • There never was a firefight, neither in the yard outside the house nor once the SEALs got inside.
  • The story of the courier whom the reportedly CIA traced, leading them to bin Laden, was a fabrication.
  • The story of the courier dying in the firefight was a cover-up “because he didn’t exist and we couldn’t produce him,” a retired senior intelligence official told Hersh.
  • The way the CIA actually found out where bin Laden was is that a “Pakistani walk-in” who wanted the $25 million reward came in and told the CIA about it.
  • Osama bin Laden was not armed, contrary to reports that he had a machine gun and was killed in a firefight, and he was not killed with just one or two bullets but “obliterated.”
  • “Seals cannot live with the fact that they killed bin Laden totally unopposed, and so there has to be an account of their courage in the face of danger. The guys are going to sit around the bar and say it was an easy day? That’s not going to happen,” that same retired senior intelligence official said.
  • “Despite all the talk” about what the SEALs collected on-site, the retired official said there were “no garbage bags full of computers and storage devices. The guys just stuffed some books and papers they found in his room in their backpacks.”
  • The story about bin Laden’s sea burial may be a fabrication.
  • The retired official told Hersh that bin Laden’s “remains, including his head… were thrown into a body bag and, during the helicopter flight back to Jalalabad, some body parts were tossed out over the Hindu Kush mountains—or so the Seals claimed.”
  • Obama was going to wait until a week after bin Laden’s death to announce it, and he was going to tell the American people that bin Laden had been killed by a drone, but after the SEALs had to blow up their malfunctioning helicopter on-site, attracting attention locally, everything changed.
  • The story about the vaccination program carried out locally in an attempt to get bin Laden’s DNA—a story that “led to the cancellation of other international vaccination programmes that were now seen as cover for American spying”—wasn’t true.
  • Retired official again: “It’s a great hoax.”

(emphasis original)

The American press has been completely dismissive of Hersh’s report, and, it’s fair to say that the sourcing is not as solid as I would have liked.

Then again, when you look at the biggest supporter of the “Zero Dark Thirty” narrative, the CIA, we know that they are still lying about torture, that they still nave not come clean about spying on the Senate Intelligence Committee, and basically wrote the movie “Zero Dark Thirty”.

I know that the movie version is false, at least as to whether torture worked, the Senate Intelligence Committee report proved that.

I’m not sure where the truth lies, and any dealing with the machinations of the “war on terror” in general, and the Pakistani state security apparatus in particular. is a bag full of cats.

At this point, I’ll go with Charlie Pierce’s:

What’s clear is that, in the war on terror, or whatever it is in which we’ve been engaged since we handed the military policy over to the spooks and thrown international crisis diplomacy into the vast, deep underbrush of myth and legend generated by the conjuring spells of the intelligence world, that we willingly surrendered self-government to magic and spellcraft. And Osama bin Laden is still dead, and his body is still at the bottom of the sea. Maybe.

I’m not clear what the truth is, except (of course) for the fact that the CIA tortured, that it did not work, and that Langley lies about everything.

I is confuzzled.

*And yes, I mean that statement. If is just ¼ true, this is the biggest story that Seymour f%$#ing Hersh has ever broken. Think about that for a moment.

The French Finally Start Making Foreign Sales for the Rafale

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For a number of years now, the Rafale has been the bridesmaid, and never the bride, on foreign sales.

The logjam broke when India selected the Dassault aircraft as the winner of its MMRCA competition.

The contract was for 126 aircraft, with the first 18 being delivered by Dassault, and the remainder being locally manufactured by state owned Hindustan Aeronautics Limited (HAL).

At this point contract negotiations because Dassault was unwilling to offer performance guarantees for the aircraft manufactured by HAL:

After months of seeing Dassault Aviation being browbeaten in the Indian press, French arms procurement agency DGA defended its contractor, asserting that a 2012 agreement to provide India with Rafale fighter jets never committed the company to guarantee aircraft manufactured in India at state-owned Hindustan Aeronautics Ltd. (HAL). However, a recent senior adviser to HAL’s management tells Aviation Week that guaranteeing HAL’s work is not the issue, but that the French are being “rigid” and refusing to stand behind the integrity of the design.

 “Dassault will not be responsible for the whole contract. It is a co-management setup,” says French defense procurement chief Laurent Collet-Billon, who was clear that France will not assume full liability for HAL-built Rafales. “It cannot be a problem, because it was not in the request for proposals [RFP].”

 Speaking to reporters during an annual media address Feb. 9, France’s arms procurement chief said the €10.2 billion ($12 billion) agreement—which has been under negotiation for more than three years—calls for the first 18 of 126 Rafale jets to be built in France. After that, HAL would take over production of the remaining 108 aircraft.

 ………

 Moreover, a retired senior Indian military officer who was involved in the drafting of the original RFP and has been a senior advisor to HAL, tells Aviation Week that “the French don’t want to be accountable in any way. The original equipment manufacturer [OEM] has to stand guarantee with respect to design and integrity of design. The French are trying to get away from the OEM’s responsibility.” He added that the defense ministry would eventually have to choose between the Rafale and the Fifth-Generation Fighter Aircraft (FGFA), a HAL-developed variant of the Sukhoi T-50.

 ………

 Dassault’s response to the RFP was influenced by a planned partnership with Reliance Industries, a $75 billion private-sector energy-based conglomerate that planned to expand into aerospace and defense. Reliance would have performed much of the manufacturing work on the locally built Rafales in new-build facilities. However, the Indian government has insisted that HAL build the aircraft. The original manufacturers of the Su-30MKI and Jaguar were not asked for similar guarantees.

The subtext here is that Dassault has absolutely no confidence in the ability of HAL to make Rafales in a timely or competent manner.

After much negotiation, it was offered that HAL be upgraded to co-contractor status, which would have the effect of increasing technical transfer at the cost of HAL being responsible for any guarantees on the aircraft that they build.

While all of this was going on, an actual sales deal was signed with Egypt, which would have 24 jets pulled out of the current pipeline for the French AF, and modified slightly. (Basically pulling wiring for nuclear weapons and going with a non-NATO communications system)

The fact that Rafael finally had some export orders, along with the fact that India has a desperate need for new airframes, (it’s aging fleet of MiG-21s are crashing with alarming regularity) India and France cut a deal for a government to government transfer of 36 of the fighter jets:

India will now negotiate direct purchase of 36 Rafale jets from France through a government-to-government deal worth around $4 billion, without any “Make in India” or technology transfer component, to meet IAF’s urgent “critical operational necessity” for new fighters.

 After Modi held extensive talks with French President Francois Hollande in Paris on Friday, it was announced that fresh commercial negotiations will now be held for the direct acquisition of two Rafale squadrons (each has 18 jets) in “flyaway” condition.

 “France has agreed to fast-track the deliveries and give us better terms for the outright purchase and longer maintenance support for the jets. Finding the money for this contract should not be a problem since it will have to be paid in installments linked to deliveries,” said a source.

Basically, the French came away with the upside of an Indian deal, it removed uncertainty in other nations about being a “first mover” on the export front, which led to the Egypt deal, and they did not have to hitch their wagon to the famously f%$#ed up HAL, which, as evidenced by the 30+ year and counting development of the Tejas lightweight fighter, is something that would have bitten Dassult in the butt at a later date.
.

And now there is the announcement of the sale of an additional 24 aircraft to Qatar.

After what must have been over a decade of uncertainty, it appears that Dassault will stay in the fighter business.

Well, it was Only a Matter of Time Until we Killed a White Guy………

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And now the Obama administration has been forced to admit that they killed two white hostages in drone strikes:

An American aid worker and another man held hostage by Al Qaeda were killed in an American drone strike in Pakistan in January, government officials disclosed on Thursday, underscoring the perils of a largely invisible, long-distance war waged through video screens, joysticks and sometimes incomplete intelligence.

 Intending to wipe out a compound linked to the terrorist group, the Central Intelligence Agency authorized the attack with no idea that the hostages were being held there despite hundreds of hours of surveillance, the officials said. Even afterward, they said, the agency did not realize at first that it had killed an American it had long sought to rescue, with the wrenching news becoming clear over time.

 The violent death of an American at the hands of his own government proved a searing moment in a drone war that has come to define the nation’s battle with Al Qaeda, especially since President Obama took office. Visibly upset, Mr. Obama came to the White House briefing room shortly after his staff issued a written statement announcing the deaths to make a rare personal apology.

But no one gave a sh%$ when a 16 year old American kid, Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, was killed by drones “accidentally”, former White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said, “I would suggest that you should have a far more responsible father if they are truly concerned about the well being of their children. I don’t think becoming an al Qaeda jihadist terrorist is the best way to go about doing your business.”

His dad was a jihadi, so it was all cool.

One of the important thing to note is that the White House had no idea who was in the al-Qaeda compound:

The targets of the deadly drone strikes that killed two hostages and two suspected American members of al-Qaida were “al-Qaida compounds” rather than specific terrorist suspects, the White House disclosed on Thursday.

The lack of specificity suggests that despite a much-publicized 2013 policy change by Barack Obama restricting drone killings by, among other things, requiring “near certainty that the terrorist target is present”, the US continues to launch lethal operations without the necessity of knowing who specifically it seeks to kill, a practice that has come to be known as a “signature strike”.

Josh Earnest, the White House spokesman, acknowledged that the January deaths of hostages Warren Weinstein and Giovanni Lo Porto might prompt the tightening of targeting standards ahead of lethal drone and other counter-terrorism strikes. A White House review is under way.

“In the aftermath of a situation like this, it raises legitimate questions about whether additional changes need to be made to these protocols,” Earnest said.

………

Jameel Jaffer, deputy legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union, said the accidental killings revealed on Thursday raise “questions about the reliability and the depth of the intelligence that the government is relying on to conduct drone strikes”.

“In neither of these two cases did the government actually know beforehand who it was killing. It does raise questions about how much the government knows – or how little the government knows – before it pulls the trigger,” Jaffer said.

“Perhaps that doesn’t in itself suggest that the strikes were unlawful, but it certainly raises some questions.”

It appears that the CIA thought that something might be wrong when there were two extra bodies found at the strike sites.

Oops!

I will note two things, said by the inimitable Charlie Pierce:

Am I being unpatriotic if I mention that, at this point, I wouldn’t trust the CIA to give me directions to the mall?

There has been a lot of “collateral damage” (Dead innocents) from drone strikes, but it is clear that the CIA is FAR more reckless than the Pentagon over this, though it has improved from the excesses of Petraeus’ disastrous stint as DCIA.

His second point is more important:

I’ve always thought of the drone war in terms of the melon vendor and the guy in the goat cart on the other side of the road. There’s an al Qaeda operative buying a melon from a vendor. Meanwhile, a guy with a goat cart comes up the other side of the road. Suddenly, here comes death from above. The terrorist is dead. So is the melon vendor. So is the guy in the goat cart on the other side of the road. They’re all blown into equally tiny bits. How do we think the families of the melon vendor and the guy with the goat cart are going to take this? We create a desire for retribution with which our grandchildren may have to cope. And we may never know the names of the melon dealer or the guy with the goat cart, the way we now know the names of Warren Weinstein and Giovanni Lo Porto. We may never know the name of the melon dealer until his grandchild blows up an airplane. And none of that should be surprising because that’s also what happens when you make war, any kind of war, in a place.

The drone campaign is clearly excessive, and as a result, we are destabilizing the region, and creating a generation of people who want to make war on America.

Anyone who thinks that our drone campaign makes us safer is insane.

And I Thought that US Defense Procurement was Tortuous………

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After 32 years development, India’s first indigenous fighter has entered service, albeit with far less “indigenous” content than originally envisaged:

The Indian Air Force (IAF) today received the first indigenously built Light Combat Aircraft (LCA) designed by the Aeronautical Development Agency (ADA) and built by Hindustan Aeronautics (HAL). The LCA, also named ‘Tejas’, was handed over today by Defense Minister Manohar Parrikar to the Indian Air Force Chief Air Marshal, Arup Raha, in Bangalore. Parrikar congratulated all parties involved in the program for their achievement and called upon them to ‘think out of the box’ to meet the schedule and challenges by applying the right management tools. “Work culture should modify by adapting better technology and tools to achieve better results” Parrikar urged his audience.

 LCA-SP1, the first aircraft handed over to the air force, rolled off the HAL assembly line in September and, since then, has been inspected to Initial Operational Clearance II, attesting its airworthiness for operational missions. Previous Tejas fighters delivered to the IAF since 2011 have been used primarily for training, as they were qualified only under ‘IOC-I’ rating. Full operational clearance of the LCA is expected by the end of 2015.

 Initially HAL will produce only six aircraft per year, the goal is to build 20 aircraft by 2018 to equip Bangalore based No. 45 Squadron (Flying Daggers) – the first IAF squadron to fly the Tejas. Production will slowly ramp up to 16 aircraft per year. Overall the IAF plans to deploy 10-14 squadrons, each equipped with 21 Tejas.

 ………

 Meeting deadlines has not been the strong side of the LCA program. [You can say that again —mgs] Launched in 1983 to replace India’s Russian-made MiG-21 fighter jets, the LCA took 32 years to mature to this stage – an extremely long process, even by Indian standards. Most of the MiGs it was supposed to replace have already been phased out; about a hundred that still remain in service are to be retired by 2017. With the French Rafale contract signing nowhere in sight, and LCA gearing up slowly to deliver only a single squadron in two years, the IAF will have to deactivate 10 squadrons by 2017, against a force structure requirement of 42 squadrons originally planned.

 ………

 As production gears up, the Tejas is expected to begin to produce a return on investment – the unit cost of the aircraft is expected to be between $27 and $32 million (170-200 Crore), which is less than half the cost of an Indian-built Su-30MKI and significantly lower than other, fully equipped western alternatives, such as the Gripen and F-16. However, the Tejas will be more expensive than the less-equipped Chinese or Korean fighters, such as the JF-17 and F/A-50.

At a production rate of 6 a year? Puh-lease.

Although India presents the LCA as an indigenous aircraft, even HAL admits it is not fully domestic, as its engine, some of the avionics, and some of the weapon systems are foreign. In fact, only 60 percent of the aircraft is ‘indigenous’. When the program began the intention was to make the LCA fully indigenous. This would have required Indian industry to master new production techniques and to develop an indigenous engine, as well as indigenous electronic, electro-optical and electro-mechanical systems, and software systems, including flight controls and mission management systems.

The relatively high level of foreign content is likely to make those numbers impossible.

I do not doubt that there will be 1-2 squadrons equipped, but not 200 aircraft, particularly when it still needs a lot of development to match payload and range capacity of its near peers. (At least according to Wiki)

Scholars in Pakistan Say What I’ve Been Saying for Years

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That the prevalence of terrorism in the Muslim world is largely funded by the House of Saud:

Federal Minister for Inter-provincial Coordination (IPC) Riaz Hussain Pirzada has accused the Saudi government of creating instability across the Muslim world, including Pakistan, through distribution of money for promoting its ideology.

Addressing a two-day ‘Ideas Conclave’ organised by the “Jinnah Institute” think tank in Islamabad, the federal minister said ‘the time has come to stop the influx of Saudi money into Pakistan’.

Now if only someone like a US Senator were to issue a similar condemnation.

It is patently clear that the font from which international Jihad springs is the pocketbook of the House of Saud.

They fund the schools where Jihadis are created, the social welfare organizations which they fund are Islamist, and they make a concerted effort to export their home grown nut-jobs to other Arab and Muslim nations, where they are some else’s problem.

H/t Emptywheel

Indian Boomer Enters Seal Trials

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Speaking or Indian defense upgrades, the first Indian built SSBNs has entered sea trials:

In a major step in validation of indigenous defence technologies, the Indian built nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarine Arihant completed its harbour trials and entered the sea here on Monday.

Built under the highly secretive Advanced Technology Vessel project monitored directly by the Prime Minister’s Office, the nuclear-powered submarine emerged from the breakwaters of the Visakhapatnam Harbour under the watchful gaze of a low flying helicopter. The 112 metre, 6000 tonne partially submerged Arihant glided into the Bay of Bengal as part of its sea trials, sailing north along the coast before disappearing into the mist.

The Arihant class is kind of an odd hybrid: It only carries 4 Polaris class missiles or 12 shorter range missiles, and at 6000 tons it’s on the smallish size for a missile boat.

It is also the first indigenously designed and built nuclear submarine for the Indians, so it represents a big step forward.

India Initiates STOBAR Tests with Light Combat Aircraft

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India’s defense upgrades continue apace.

They have started ski-jump tests with the Light Combat Aircraf (LCA):

The first prototype of the Navalaized Tejas Indigenous Combat Aircraft (LCA) developed for the Indian Navy has took off saturday (December 20, 2014) from the Ski-Jump facility of Shore Based Test Facility (SBTF) at INS Hansa in Goa. LCA (Navy) is designed with stronger landing gears to absorb forces exerted by the ski jump ramp during take-off, and cable arrested landing.

I’m dubious of the suitability of tailless (or canardless) design on an aircraft carrier, but this does represent a step forward for the Indian Navy.

Dear Morning Edition, the Problem is Not the Taliban it is the CIA

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Over at NPR, they had a story about how hostility to vaccination efforts in Pakistan is hobbling the Polio eradication program.

The problem is that they finger the Pakistani Taliban as the source of the problem, while soft pedaling the fact that the whole country of Pakistan has been made hostile by the CIA’s use of vaccinations in the operation to hund down Osama bin Laden:

The edict by the Islamic militants to ban immunization was in response to the CIA’s setting up a fake hepatitis vaccination campaign in Pakistan. The covert operation was part of an attempt by the U.S. spy agency to verify whether Osama bin Laden was holed up in the city of Abbottabad.
A polio vaccination booth in Rawalpindi.

The polio problem in Pakistan right now is a result of the CIA’s actions in the country, says , a prominent and moderate cleric in Pakistan. He personally accepts the polio vaccine. He encourages people at his mosque to get their kids vaccinated.

“But there are certain areas in Pakistan where the people resist [the polio vaccine] because the CIA used the polio campaign for intelligence purposes,” he says.

Like many Pakistanis, Ur Rehman erroneously says the CIA operation against bin Laden used a polio campaign for cover, even though it actually used a fake hepatitis B campaign. “The one who can use hepatitis for intelligence,” he says, “they can use polio for intelligence.”

When (and I do mean when) Polio returns to the United States, and kids end up in iron lungs, it will be largely because of this operation.

Yet another reason why the US state security apparatus needs adult supervision.

It’s Nice to Know that Someone Has a More F%$#ed Up Defense Procurement Process than the United States Does

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I am referring, of course, to the Republic of India, which has a long history of incompetent weapons development programs (Arjun tank, Kaveri engine, etc.) and corrupt foreign purchases.

We have one of the latter right now, with the India Ministry of Defense cancelling a helicopter purchase in response to a bribery scandal:

India has reacted to the scandal surrounding its purchase of 12 VVIP-roled AgustaWestland AW101 helicopters with the apparent cancellation of the €556 million ($776 million) deal.

In a statement posted late on 1 January on the Indian ministry of defence website, it says it has “terminated with immediate effect the agreement that was signed with AgustaWestland on 8 February 2010 for the supply of 12 VVIP/VIP helicopters on grounds of breach of the pre-contract integrity pact”.

Although the Anglo-Italian manufacturer had been pressing for arbitration talks to resolve the stalled deal, New Delhi has seemingly rejected this.

“Based on the opinion received earlier from the attorney general of India, it has been the view of the government that integrity-related issues are not subject to arbitration,” it says.

Nonetheless, there appears to be some ambiguity about its position until the country’s attorney general offers a fresh opinion. “However, [AgustaWestland] has since pressed for arbitration and appointed an arbitrator from its side. In view of this [the ministry of defence] sought afresh the opinion of the attorney general. With a view to safeguard the interests of the Government, [it has] nominated Mr Justice BP Jeevan Reddy as its arbitrator.”

………

A total of €51 million is alleged to have been paid as kickbacks by AgustaWestland to secure the order, an accusation strenuously denied by the company.

I have no clue why much smaller nations, like Israel and Sweden, manage to create sophisticated and effective weapons systems.

Heck of a Job, Barry………

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What a surprise we do another drone strike, a “success”, and transformed the person that we assassinated from public enemy number one to a martyr and hero:

In life, Hakimullah Mehsud, the leader of the Pakistani Taliban, was Public Enemy No. 1: a ruthless figure who devoted his career to bloodshed and mayhem, whom Pakistani pundits occasionally accused of being a pawn of Indian, or even American, intelligence.

 But after his death, it seems, Pakistani hearts have grown fonder.

 Since missiles fired by American drones killed Mr. Mehsud in his vehicle on Friday, Pakistan’s political leaders have reacted with unusual vehemence. The interior minister, Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan, denounced the strike as sabotage of incipient government peace talks with the Taliban. Media commentators fulminated about American treachery. And the former cricket star Imran Khan, now a politician, renewed his threats to block NATO military supply lines through Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa — a province his Tehreek-e-Insaf party controls — with a parliamentary vote scheduled for Monday.

 Virtually nobody openly welcomed the demise of Mr. Mehsud, who was responsible for the deaths of thousands of Pakistani civilians. To some American security analysts, the furious reaction was another sign of the perversity and ingratitude that they say have scarred Pakistan’s relationship with the United States.

 “It’s another stab in the back,” said Bill Roggio, whose website, the Long War Journal, monitors drone strikes. “Even those of us who watch Pakistan closely don’t know where they stand anymore. It’s such a double game.”

 To many Pakistanis, though, it is the United States that is double-dealing, and sentiments like Mr. Roggio’s exemplify typical American arrogance. Shireen Mazari, a senior official in Mr. Khan’s party, has urged the Pakistani military to shoot down drones.

Does anyone really really think that this makes us any safer?

It might temporarily increase the safety of our imperial contingent in Afghanistan, but our incessant drone strikes, and the resultant terror that this engenders in the population creates people who want to kill us.

It is worse than a crime, it is a mistake.

Stay Classy, Barack

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What a surprise. When Congress wants to hear testimony from innocent victims of drone strikes in Pakistan, the Obama administration invokes the immigration authorities to prevent their entry:

The US government is being accused of derailing a congressional hearing that would be the first to hear testimony from survivors of an alleged CIA drone strike by failing to grant the family’s lawyer a visa.

 Shahzad Akbar, a legal fellow with the British human rights group Reprieve and the director of the Pakistan-based Foundation for Fundamental Rights, says the state department is preventing him from taking his clients to Capitol Hill next week. The hearing would mark the first time US lawmakers heard directly from drone strike survivors.

 Akbar’s clients, Rafiq ur-Rehman, his 13-year-old son, Zubair, and his nine-year-old daughter, Nabila, are from the tribal regions of north Waziristan. The children were injured in the alleged US strike on the village of Tappi last year. Their grandmother – Rehman’s mother, Mamana – was killed.

 Rehman and his children have spent months making preparations to visit Washington after being invited by US representatives to testify in the ad hoc hearing on drone strikes.

 According to Akbar, his clients’ visas for the trip have been approved, but his has not. He believes the hold-up is political.

 “It’s not like my name is scratched because there is some sort of confusion. My name is blocked,” Akbar told the Guardian. “Before I started drone investigations I never had an issue with US visa. In fact, I had a US diplomatic visa for two years.”

 This is the third tangle Akbar has experienced with US authorities over a visa since 2011, a year after he began investigating drone strikes. In April, Akbar said he was being prevented from speaking at a human rights conference in Washington because of a delay processing his application. He was eventually granted entry.

This is indefensible, and is a consequence of having a policy that terrorizes millions throughout the world, and creates more terrorist, is indefensible.

Obama and His Evil Minions™ know that their policies will not hold up to scrutiny, so they are conspiring to keep a 13-year old talking about the death of his grandmother.

And this guy is a Nobel laureate.

What were they thinking in Sweden?

The Latest Snowden Release Does Not Surprise………

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It appears that people at all levels of the US government do not trust Pakistan:

The $52.6 billion U.S. intelligence arsenal is aimed mainly at unambiguous adversaries, including al-Qaeda, North Korea and Iran. But top-secret budget documents reveal an equally intense focus on one purported ally: Pakistan.

No other nation draws as much scrutiny across so many categories of national security concern.

A 178-page summary of the U.S. intelligence community’s “black budget” shows that the United States has ramped up its surveillance of Pakistan’s nuclear arms, cites previously undisclosed concerns about biological and chemical sites there, and details efforts to assess the loyalties of counter­terrorism sources recruited by the CIA.

Pakistan appears at the top of charts listing critical U.S. intelligence gaps. It is named as a target of newly formed analytic cells. And fears about the security of its nuclear program are so pervasive that a budget section on containing the spread of illicit weapons divides the world into two categories: Pakistan and everybody else.

The disclosures — based on documents provided to The Washington Post by former intelligence contractor Edward Snowden — expose broad new levels of U.S. distrust in an already unsteady security partnership with Pakistan, a politically unstable country that faces rising Islamist militancy. They also reveal a more expansive effort to gather intelligence on Pakistan than U.S. officials have disclosed.

Not surprising.

We’ve heard this from a lot of different sources over the years.

For anyone to trust Pakistan, and particularly its military and intelligence services, would have to be a thoroughly deluded fool.

Accountability in Free Trade, What a Concept

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Following a spate of horrific fatal disasters at Bangladeshi textile industry pressure is increasing end special trade status between that nation and the US:

After several deadly factory disasters in Bangladesh — including the collapse of an eight-story garment factory last month that left at least 1,127 people dead — labor advocates are stepping up pressure on the Obama administration, calling for it to convey its disapproval of working conditions in the country by revoking its special trade status.

But federal officials remain conflicted over the American government’s responsibility for safer labor conditions overseas, and in meetings in recent weeks they disagreed over what combination of carrots and sticks would work best to achieve this goal.

 Some officials, particularly in the State Department, say that if trade status is revoked, Washington will lose its leverage to pressure Bangladesh to improve building codes and labor rights. Labor advocates and officials from the Labor Department counter, however, that this leverage is lost anyway if the administration is never willing to use it.

 “By failing to take serious action before now even in the face of phenomenal, unprecedented death of workers, U.S. trade officials have already sent the wrong message to Bangladesh,” said Brian Campbell, policy and legal programs director of the International Labor Rights Forum, a workers advocacy group. “It’s time to send a strong signal.”

Mr. Campbell is right.

If you are not willing to have consequences to an employment regime that is corrupt and patently anti-worker (the factory owner has to approve before employees can join a union) because you fear losing leverage, then you never had any leverage to begin with.

If the US revokes the trade status, it is likely that the EU will as well, so this is a big deal, and a well deserved response.

This is not just poor pay and working conditions in Bangladesh, it is also that the state security apparatus murder labor organizers:

Last April, Aminul Islam, a prominent worker advocate, was found dead, his body bearing signs of torture. Reporters in Bangladesh said there was evidence that the government’s security forces might have been tied to the death. No one has yet been arrested. According to American diplomats and labor officials, there has been little progress in the investigation.

It’s not going to happen now, because the Obama administration is populated by “free market mousketeers”, who believe that lowered trade barriers created improved working conditions and worker protections (they don’t Bangladesh, QED), make everyone richer, and keep your daughter from dating that guy with the piercings and tattoos.